Saturday, December 21, 2013

La Scala’s season opening production of La Traviata was
dripping with drama: Diana Damrau missed her entrance in the
Second Act, Piotr Bezcala declared he won’t ever sing again in Italy after the
hard core loggionisti booed him, director
Dmitri Tcherniakov and conductor Daniele Gatti were booed even more for
allegedly butchering Verdi’s masterpiece - and at La Scala, of all theaters!

I happened to be in Milan during the run of this production
and decided I simply had to see it to have an informed opinion on such a juicy
show (also, I have a soft spot for Željko Lučić). Getting tickets for La Scala
is no easy business, the box office sells out almost immediately and the black
market is full of dubious scalpers who will meet you in a dark alley and ask
600 Euros for a partial view ticket that may or may not actually let you into
the theater. So, the only way is the old school one of “knowing someone” and,
thank goodness, I did: a family friend with a season subscription very
gracefully let me go in his place.

La Scala’s public is definitely cockier and way more
ferocious that the Met’s. Before the show started, my neighbor was very
colorfully complaining that he heard Damrau was sick and was going to be
replaced by Irina Lungu and that was going to be a total “sòla” (“ripoff”). He was
evidently expressing the general sentiment, since when La Scala’s general
manager Stéphane Lissner made the relevant announcement on stage, he was
assailed by a chorus of boos and other insults (and if these days folks still
threw market vegetables to performers on stage am sure they would have tossed a
few tomatoes to the poor guy).

Also, when conductor Daniele
Gatti made his entrance and took his spot on the pit, someone in the
audience yelled “falla piu’ veloce
stasera!” (“make it faster tonight!”), voicing the widespread criticism
that Gatti chose an unusually slow tempo for this production. I will say that Gatti’s choice of tempi may have been academically respectful of Verdi’s 1854
revision for the Venice San Benedetto theater, but was indeed a bit all over the
place, some parts too slow (the first scene, not matching the party’s frenzy),
others way too quick (Germont’s aria “D’un
padre e d’una suora / t’affretta a consolar” – poor Lučić was struggling to
keep up).

The curtain opened the moment the orchestra started to play,
and during the overture Violetta stood in the middle of a big room with a few
fancy chairs scattered throughout, high ceilings with antique molding and a
Parisian-like balcony overlooking the street. She spent the overture in front
of a mirror, looking pretty ennuied
and fatigued while getting ready for her party, fixing her make-up and
adjusting her blue gown, silvery necklace and red flower in her hair, at times
with the help of a mature redhead Annina, who looked and behaved more like a retired
opera diva than a servant (and popped up throughout the opera when you least
expected her).

When the party erupts and Violetta’s guests arrive, the
decadent modern-day take was painfully evident, with the chorus wearing a
hodgepodge of trashy party dresses and behaving in line with their outfits. If
the direction’s aim was to depict Violetta’s party life as vane and shallow, it
was definitely successful, just not a pleasant sight. While the direction of
the duets with Alfredo worked pretty well, Dmitri
Tcherniakov chose to have Violetta perform her usually solitary arias “E’ strano! e' strano!” and“Follie,
delirio vano e’ questo!”while
drinking hard liquor and clunking glasses with a silent over-dressed and
over-jeweled Annina who thus emerges in a role of girlfriend-confidante who did
not add much and, rather, was unnecessarily distracting.

The country estate scenes were to me the most successful
direction-wise, with the couple having retired to the tranquility of the
countryside, they indulge in simple domestic pleasures, Alfredo rolling out home-made
pasta dough, Violetta (sporting comfy furry slippers) scolding him on the
proper way to do it while arranging market vegetables to be prepped on the
kitchen table. These moments were cute, heart-warming and real, just the way
the enjoyment of pure romantic love should be and also worked wonderfully well
with the music. It was also a nice touch having glimpses of Germont father
pacing back and forth outside of the kitchen window, as looming presence that
will ruin the idyllic romance. The only thing that did not work here was an odd
creepy rag doll sporting Violetta’s party outfit of the opening scene sitting on
the kitchen counter (why?) that Alfredo nurses and cuddles when he realizes
that his lover is gone. While I get what the director tried to accomplish here,
it was totally unnecessary and looked pretty awkward.

With the second act, we’re back to a trashy party, this time
allegedly in costume, though the only character really wearing one seems to be
Flora (with a ridiculous native American huge feathered headpiece), while the
rest of the attendees were maybe dressed up like distasteful party people if
that’s even a costume. Also, why on earth is Violetta wearing a small Afro wig?
And she takes it off at the end of the act? Outfits aside, I had a major
problem here with the chorus singing arias such as “Noi siamo zingarelle” and “Di
Madride noi siam mattadori” that are normally sung and danced by characters
looking and behaving like gypsies and matadors, just because that’s how they
dressed up for the party. Here they did not have any such costumes and their
sang words did not really match their acting as they just paced back and forth
nonsensically following poor Alfredo from one end of the stage to the other. Drastic
departures from the meaning of the libretto like these are pure heresy, no
excuses allowed. The “money-throwing” scene though was effective, with the bills
flying in the frame of the arched walls and the crowd in the background.

The final act was set back in Violetta’s apartment, this
time virtually empty, except for a mirror, two chairs, a tray of medicines, a
phone, a comforter, an ikea cardboard box full of pictures and again the odd
creepy Violetta-looking rag doll. The bare bones sets were successful in
conveying the fact that the poor woman sold everything (cannot even afford a
bed) and provided a perfect barren backdrop for the heart-wrenching arias
throughout the finale. A couple of things did not entirely work though: Alfredo
sings “Parigi o cara” while trying to
force Violetta to eat a cream puff (while I get he’s feeling awkward about the
whole situation, this was too much) and, most importantly, Violetta dies alone
on her chair, while Annina is disdainfully chasing away Alfredo and his dad, as
if to say “it’s all your fault now get out of here”. Call me romantic, but to
me Violetta must die in the arms of her loved one and leave him heart-broken.
Tcherniakov’s take was excessively nihilist in denying the unfortunate couple
even this final comfort, as if to say it’s too late, nothing can fix this
anymore.

Having said all that, if one has really good singers, sets
and direction become secondary. And La Scala had some pretty good ones. Piotr Beczala sounded fresh, confident
and with a full-bodied tone and, although he is warmer and more passionate when
he sings in Russian (think about his Lensky in the Met’s opening Onegin), his
Alfredo was convincing if a touch clueless at times, though that’s part of the
character.

Željko Lučić was,
as usual, magnificent with his signature sweet effortless power and musicality
that are just made for Verdi. His duets with Violetta were warm and tender,
expressing the quintessential Verdian father-daughter love, as Lučićalways
does so masterfully in Rigoletto. I was curious to see whether his voice
sounded even stronger at La Scala than at the Met given the theater’s size
difference, but I will say that the Met’s acoustics are such that really
amplify it all, even more than a smaller space like La Scala.

But it was soprano Irina
Lungu who literally brought the whole house down, including my cynical skeptic neighbor who at the end was applauding like a madman and ecstatically
yelling brava, brava!While she was understandably tense at the
beginning given her last minute engagement, she loosened up towards the end of
the first act party scenes and grew stronger throughout the opera, delivering a truly terrific
performance in the third act, her “Addio,
del passato” making me weep like a baby. She movingly cried herself at
curtain call when the whole theater rose to salute her enthusiastically which,
coming from the ferocious La Scala’s public, was quite a sight.

All in all this production had some good and bad moments,
the modernizing efforts to keep La Traviata contemporary and real being
successful only a few times, with some unfortunate silly touches (that rag doll!).
The very core of the emotions at stake, however, was conveyed powerfully,
except maybe in the nihilist finale. It was brave of La Scala to commission
such a controversial production to open its season on the Verdi bicentenary –
there’s nothing like some good extra-curricular drama to stir the drama on
stage.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

We're in Las Vegas, circa 1960. “The Duke” is a Sinatra-like
singer and the powerful owner of a casino where vice, money and decadent
entertainment abound. He’s also a serial womanizer who can never get enough of
the ladies. In fact, his entourage of suave men in shiny tuxedos often procures
fresh prey for him. The hunchback Rigoletto is a comic who works for the Duke
and is always poking fun at everyone, often pushing jokes too far. Enter a
wealthy Arab sheik that Rigoletto needles obscenely as a cover to the Duke's
recent conquest of his daughter. The humiliated sheik explodes in a rage and
curses both the Duke and his comic. In a city where luck and superstition rule,
a “maledizione” is serious stuff.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Rigoletto gets off his comic shift and goes home to his only
family, his beloved daughter Gilda – a beautiful pious young thing he keeps
locked up at home at all times (except to go to Sunday mass). He is too afraid the
vicious men of the town may corrupt his good little girl. Bad luck has it that
somehow the Duke managed to lay eyes on sweet, chaste Gilda and decides he
wants her. This time his trick will be to play the part of a lovey-dovey
penniless student, which works pretty well. Gilda falls romantically head over
heels for the “student” who also seems totally taken though that, too, could
just be another womanizing strategy.

The Duke’s entourage decides to play a prank on Rigoletto and,
thinking that Gilda is his lover, they abduct her and bring her to the Duke for
his entertainment. The Duke deflowers Gilda at lightening speed and immediately
thereafter loses interest. When Rigoletto discovers what happened to his
innocent daughter he is rage-crazed and swears to avenge her honor. His bloody
vengeance involves a hired (but honest) assassin and his slutty sister and it
may or not go as planned...

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Does this sound like an 1851 opera? Or more like a modern mob
movie? The Met showed us that time and place hardly matter as this story could
be set in 16th century Mantua or 1960s Las Vegas and work equally well. Either
way, it’s rife with dramatic tension, fiercely passionate Verdi music and some
of the most beautiful singing.

It was a thrill to see the Met’s 2012 Las Vegas Rigoletto again. The singers in last year’s inaugural
cast for the debut of this new production were so spectacular that it hardly
mattered where they set it. Revisiting it again this year with a new cast and Pablo Heras-Casado conducting, we stand
by the conviction that this modernized production works. The sets are dynamic
and elaborate and the story is only made more vivid than if they had kept it in
sixteenth-century Mantua with men in tights and puffy sleeves.

This time we decided to follow the Met English subtitles
throughout the opera. And not out of necessity (being Italian speakers and
knowing Rigoletto by heart) but
rather because we heard that subtitles, too, were innovated by this production.
The Met pushed its modernizing efforts to the point of revising the traditional
English translation of the Italian libretto to jazz it up with 1960s Vegas
slang. Updating the subtitles to match the era in which the opera is set is
sure blasphemy to purists and really a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it
can engage the non-Italian speaking audience in livelier ways than a verbatim
translation of 19th-century poetic language, which is admirable. On the other
hand, however, it may be distracting and fall into the trap of going too far
and radically changing the sense of the original, which is, indeed, a mortal sin
even by our standards.

The Met did not fall into such trap and offered a refreshingly
updated and often clever translation by Michael Panayos and Paul Cremo, without
ever departing from the original core meaning but rather just massaging the
text with glittery period touches that most times worked pretty well. Here’s an
example:

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Original Libretto:

DUCA

Ma
dee luminoso

In
corte tal astro qual sole brillare.

Per
voi qui ciascuno dovrà palpitare.

Per
voi già possente la fiamma d'amore

Inebria,
conquide, distrugge il mio core.

CONTESSA

Calmatevi
…

Traditional Translation:

DUKE

So
bright a star should be shedding

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

its
brilliance on my court.

You
would make every heart beat faster here.

The
fires of passion already flare

headily,
conquering, consuming my heart.COUNTESS

Calm
yourself!

“Rat Pack” Translation:

DUKE

Your
movie-star looks

really
light up the place

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Every
heart in this club

should
be beating for you

You’re
irresistible, baby

you
make me burn with love

you
send me to the moon!

COUNTESS

Take it easy, fella!

The “astro,” or star,
metaphor carries over into a reference to movie starlets, and the Duke’s court
is appropriately reconfigured as a club, while the Petrarchan language of the
consuming fires of love translate directly into hepcat talk. It’s colorful and
clever and almost even more successfully poetic with respect to the otherwise
rather bland conventional English translation also presented here. After all,
the Duke’s character is the kind of superficial lady’s man who would have come
up with zingers like: “Come on, baby, let’s give it a whirl!”

When it comes to narrative strategies, Michael Mayer’s production
not only remains true to the core of the original opera but also adds several
touches that flesh out better the characters. The Duke’s is one of the
characterizations that benefited most from the Vegas take. In classic
productions, when in Act II he is sad because he thinks Gilda has been kidnapped and
he starts going all mushy about she being “the one,” it is always a bit hard
to believe since the Duke is supposed to be a chauvinist womanizer. This
production has him do lines of cocaine and drink hard liquor while he sings
these arias, thus suggesting, in line with the core of the character, that the
Duke was just babbling under the effects of hard drugs and stiff alcohol, and,
no matter how convinced he sounds in his singing, his convictions are as
steadfast as a feather in the wind. Later, in Act III this Sinatra-like Duke
sings the famous misogynistic aria “La donna e’ mobile / qual piuma al vento”
while twirling around the pole of a strip club, making it clear (in case there
was any doubt) that he’s the fickle one, not women.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Another stroke of genius is the Rat Pack transformation of the Duke’s entourage that perfectly
reflects the goliardic spirit of the courtiers, and very entertainingly so.
Their chorus scenes are extremely vivid and effective, with a group of men in
shiny multi-color tuxedos and a lot of hair gel gallivanting around in grand
early-1960s cinematic style, all while singing Verdi. The three main Rat Pack
characters, Borsa (Alexander Lewis),
Marullo (Jeff Mattsey) and Count
Ceprano (David Crawford) were
definitely more fleshed out here than in other productions. Inspired by the
likes of Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin and Sam Giancana, they evidently had a
lot of fun with their roles and they were a pleasure to watch with their
shenanigans, especially during some of the musical interludes.

This production at times even improves the narrative when compared
to a more traditional setting. In fact, in Act II classic productions always
struggle with a weak plot point when Rigoletto cannot hear the courtiers
kidnapping his screaming daughter while he holds a ladder because he has a mask
over his eyes (that allegedly also covers his ears?!?). Mayer cleverly solves
the problem by sending Rigoletto “upstairs” in an elevator so that he’s not
physically there when the actual kidnapping occurs and his failure to notice is
thus made credible.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Željko Lučić was just so
spectacular last year that it was going to be a tall order for Dmitri Horostovsky to match his
predecessor’s performance in the eponymous role. With his action movie star
good looks, Dmitri is not your typical Rigoletto. And boy did they do a number
on him in make-up! His transformation from “barihunk” into old hunchback with
paunch and a few strands of white hair combed across an almost bald
scalp was terrific, particularly since the proud shaking of his flowing silver
mane is one of Dmitri's signature moves in virtually every other role he
performs. Also, one would think that both his haughty acting and fierce singing
style generally better suit a sexy villain rather than the hunch-backed,
pathos-invoking paterfamilias at the center of Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Photo credit: Ruby Washington / The New York Times

Dmitri’s acting was intensely accurate and generally successful in
getting into character, showing a range that we rarely see from him. In the
first scene he was hamming it up with the lounge dancers and twisting his hips
like Elvis as he taunted the sheik, rendering the comic side of Rigoletto very
energetic when compared to traditional settings. Horostovsky was a fairly
convincing tender father in his duets with Gilda, however his best stage
presence (not surprisingly) was in the raging bits, so much that in “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” he was a
bit too busy forcefully acting and running from one courtier to the other,
affecting a bit the intensity of his singing. While Dmitri’s angry-edged
baritone sounded on the snarling end at times, he consistently delivered deep
dark tones with hints of a smooth sweetness that made for a vocally charismatic
Rigoletto. The evening we saw him, his voice felt unusually restrained in the
first act, but when he loosened up he was sensational. His duets with Gilda
were as lovely and heart wrenching as ever, “Fanciulla piangi” making the fanciulla of us cry copiously
and Dmitri’s vocal performance in the third act ranged from vengeful to deeply
dramatic to desperately defeated, just the way we like a Rigoletto.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

But it was the young soprano, Sonya
Yoncheva, who stole the show while stepping in to replace Aleksandra Kurzak
(pregnant with tenor Roberto Alagna’s child). Yoncheva sang consistently
stronger than anybody else on stage, outshining even all of the seasoned Met
veterans in this cast, including both Horostovsky and Polenzani. The piercing
purity of her voice streamed effortlessly from her petite frame. With her frail
yet powerful lyricism and her charming presence, Yoncheva dominated her scenes
gracefully and tragically. Fresh faced and youthful, she really looked the part
and embodied all the vulnerability of the poor tragic naïve Gilda. Yoncheva did
not win Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2010 for nothing – definitely
a singer to keep an eye on.

Matthew
Polenzani is growing on us, while we were not convinced by his Nemorino in
2012, we enjoyed him in Maria Stuarda and Così and really
appreciated him as the Duke. He delivered clean, fresh sound, clear
articulation, on point tempo and musicality, and great Sinatra-like acting. On
the whole, he is highly likeable, but he still does not stir the deep turmoil
that a world-class Italian-style tenor should be capable of. We find Polenzani
to be often too high pitched; lacking a certain manly depth, with his voice
still sounding almost too young, remaining too firmly on the surface.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

Slovak bass Stefan Kocán
always exudes charisma with commanding stage presence and his Sparafucile was
no exception. While we've seen and loved him before in the role, this time his
acting got even better, portraying the honest villain (he may be a hired
assassin but he's not a thief!) with the sleek confidence of a film noir actor.
Vocally, Kocán has a deep, rich and smooth tone that somehow comes as a
surprise from such a young singer and is always a pleasure to hear. We wish
there were more extensive bass roles around so that we could get more Kocán
–looking forward to seeing him as Konchak in Prince Igor in February!

A lot has been said about the spectacular sets of this production,
for which no detail was small enough, from the diverse use of the “neon
vocabulary” throughout the three acts, to the wink-wink references to the Met’s
own decorative elements (gates, chandeliers, curtains), to the Nevada license
plate of Sparafucile’s car ("SPARFUC"). We can only let the pictures
speak for themselves and salute the Met’s set design team for the terrific
effort.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera

This production is to us the perfect example of a clever new take
on a classic and thus a must see for virtually everybody: it may entertainingly
lure opera-virgins into the art form, convert the traditionalist to
modernizations of classic repertoire and refresh Rigoletto for those who know it by heart. Let’s hear it for Met
Opera taking more calculated risks like this!